The Completist

“Hey, hey, hey, we’re moving in the right direction now.”

The Completist

As explored in a previous article (see Obsessions), I can get quite obsessed by certain things. As we saw, I love books, both collecting and reading them. As is expected of the obsessive reader, there are certain authors that I read time and again and others that published in such prolific profundity that the challenge is to hunt down and read their every last publication.

Isaac Asimov, for instance, published over four hundred books in his lifetime, fiction and non-fiction, covering everything from science and science fiction to commentaries on the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I don’t quite have the time or the money to hunt down that many works from one author, but I do have a dozen or so Asimov books so who knows what may happen in the future. The Foundation Series and his short stories though are done. You’ll learn more about science reading his book, The Left Hand of the Electron, than from a dozen Horizon documentaries.

Back down the echelons of the more manageable, I’ve been obsessed with Emile Zola ever since I read Germinal fifteen years ago. Germinal is just one novel in Zola’s Rouqon-Macquart series, which runs to twenty books and one short story. The rule here is that they have to be found in second hand bookshops. So far I have found only half (less one short story), although two of those found are in the original French, waiting for when my French gets a little stronger (it’s getting there, though Zola apparently uses a style strange even to native speakers).

Even in English though, the Rouqon-Macquart series is an amazing group of novels, grander in scope even than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, featuring over  three hundred main characters from the same family. Germinal alone is in my opinion amongst the greatest novels ever written, certainly in my top ten, even up against some pretty stiff competition. 

To the best of my knowledge I have read and own mostly everything by Ernest Hemingway except for a handful of his later short stories and his first book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. Actually, I also own, The Dangerous Summer, his second book on bullfighting, which I still haven’t got around to reading, given that I don’t exactly approve of the sport. Then I’ve read plenty of his stories and articles on hunting despite not approving of that either. I’ll eventually read both of them. It’s the completist in me.

I agree with Michael Palin’s assessment of Hemingway: we wouldn’t have got along, but he always wrote passionately. His fiction is as much a travelogue, from Kilimanjaro to Cuba, Venice to Key West, and his journalism gives one as much a sense of the First World War as his novel, A Farwell to Arms. As with Zola though, I think I read his best book first. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a brilliant novel, although long, capturing much of the confusion of the Spanish Civil War. If you want to start with something lighter, there is always the much shorter The Old Man and the Sea, which only takes an hour or two.

My favourite American writer though is and probably always will be John Steinbeck. In the Maher Hierarchy of Great Writers, Steinbeck sits second only to James Joyce. Like Hemingway, I think I’ve read pretty much everything of Steinbeck’s, from the well-known masterpieces, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden (my personal favourite), to the lesses known greats like The Winter of Our Discontent and In Dubious Battle, to his non-fiction gems, Once There Was a War, Travels With Charlie and Journal of a Novel. There a couple of earlier novels that I’ve not found yet and I got a bit bored with The Log of The Sea of Cortez, written when sailing the Sea of Cortez with his scientist friend, Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in the novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday). As with Hemingway’s bullfighting books, I circle back around to it eventually.

I can’t say enough in praise of John Steinbeck. He never wrote a bad novel (ok, The Wayward Bus wasn’t great), but he did write several masterpieces that no one can claim to be well-read without having read. Any writer who wants to know about narrative structure should study Steinbeck in detail. There isn’t a writer living or dead that tells a better story than John Steinbeck. Neither is there a writer who knows better how to end a novel. Steinbeck novels always end with a bang.

 

Then there’s Graham Greene. There’s two early Greene novels that have never been republished, at the author’s own request, which I will track down someday, but otherwise I’ve read pretty much everything. Greene was certainly more of a mainstream writer than Steinbeck, perhaps even Hemingway, but there are still perhaps half a dozen of his novels that remain master pieces. Certainly, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, Brighton Rock and Travels With My Aunt are some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

As with Hemingway and Steinbeck, Green wrote a number of non-fiction works that are just as entertaining and enlightening as his fiction. His volumes of autobiography, Ways of Escape and A Sort of Life are revelatory on his highly complex character. He converted to Roman Catholicism, but led anything but a virtuous life, having an affair with a married actress, as fictionalised in The End of the Affair. He was a former MI6 operative, but also a habitual drug user, including cannabis and opium, the latter of which he smoked during his time as journalist in Vietnam, where his experiences led him to write The Quiet American, concerning the CIA’s terrorist activities in the country during the 1950s. The main character of the British journalist, Thomas Fowler, is as autobiographical a character as Greene ever created.

In reading Greene’s non-fiction work, Getting to Know the General, I first heard of how the country of Panama came to be and it’s worth repeating. Panama was for a time part of Columbia. Then the Panama Canal started to be built, but when the private American companies in charge of the project ran into financial difficulty, the American government took over the project, unilaterally decided that Panama wanted to be its own country and declared Panamanian independence. The country was then further split into the Panama Canal zone, run by the Americans, and the non-Canal zone run by the Panamanian government. Greene became good friends with General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama until Torrijos was killed in a car crash in 1981, even accompanying him at one point to speak at the UN in New York. Getting to Know the General is another hidden gem that most people know nothing about. See also, Journey Without Maps, Greene’s account of exploring the country of Liberia.

There are many other authors that I hope to one day complete reading. One Kurt Vonnegut novel, Player Piano, remains on my list, plus a number of his short story and non-fiction collections. I also have a great love for Alice Walker. I’ve read all of Walker’s major novels and some lesser known fiction and non-fiction. Like Zola, everything I have read by Alice Walker I have so far found in second hand bookshops, but there is enough left from her bibliography that I think I will have to hunt down through Abe Books and the like. Her most famous novel is The Colour Purple, for obvious reasons, but The Temple of My Familiar is even better, the narrative switching between a number of different characters, including Celie and Shug Avery from The Colour Purple.

I guess the common theme to emerge from this article is that I love reading writers who are also fascinating characters in their own right and Alice Walker has always fascinated me. She was taught at Spellman College in Atlanta by the heroic historian, Howard Zinn, married a Jewish man and moved to Mississippi, where it is said they were the first ‘interracial couple’ (I’ve never really understood that term, as simplistic and idiotic as all ‘racial’ language) in Mississippi and had a relationship with the singer, Tracey Chapman. Aside from one small collection essays, I read nothing of Walker’s non-fiction. The joy of reading is in the anticipation of books yet unread.

On a final note, I’m currently halfway through The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. A more inaccurate title for a book can rarely have been conceived, with section titles including The Epistemologist, The Metaphysician and The Philosopher and Expositor of Science. Russell was also a prolific writer of books, mostly non-fiction, and I have for years hunted down titles such as Political Ideals, Sceptical Ideals, On Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity in second hand bookshops, although it’s been a while since I found new one.

Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a masterpiece and an excellent introduction to the subject. Philosophy and physics have been at odds for years with each rarely even pretending to understand the other, despite both disciplines being subordinate to mathematics. Bertrand Russell was that rarest of breeds, a man who bridged the gap between mathematics, physics, philosophy, logic and linguistics and time spent in Russell’s company is time never wasted. A proper, full review of The Basic Writings will follow in a week or so.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also say that there are still a few minor Shakespeare plays I’ve not yet read. I’m savouring them.

Get it done. 

Blue Metal Jazz

Today we're thinking about the blues, metal and jazz. Mainly jazz though.

Blue Metal Jazz

These days whenever anyone asks me for my favourite genre of music I give this reply: Blues, because it is grandfather to my second and third favourites genres of music, heavy metal and jazz. Indeed, there can hardly be a style of music (outside of classical and opera) that has not been influenced by blues in the last century. I once saw on TV a Danish neo-Nazi heavy metal group singing white supremacist lyrics over 12 bar blues. Sometimes incredulity can only give way to hysterical laughter.

As previously written about in an article on Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’, heavy metal was the first music scene I got into. If I’d been born a decade earlier, I’d have undoubtedly been a punk, but I was a teenager in the late 80s and it was heavy metal at this time that was in the ascendancy. In many ways, I’m glad. Punk is fine and sometimes, as with the first few Clash albums or that one vitriolic offering from the Sex Pistols, even brilliant. Punk though was very much of its time, visceral and immediate, it made no apologies and it acknowledged few debts to its roots. It also had, ultimately, a limited range.

The reasons that I grew to love metal are the same reasons that I have grown to love jazz. On the musical spectrum, both occupy an enormous range of styles. They also blur the boundaries between neighbouring genres. Are AC/DC a rock band or a heavy metal band? Is Nina Simone a blues singer or a jazz singer? The answer in each case is both.

With both metal and jazz there is a bewildering breadth of styles, from blues rock to hard rock to glam rock (thankfully a dying breed), speed metal to black metal to progressive and power metal . There’s modal jazz, cool jazz, free jazz, and jazz-fusion; bebop, hard bop and fast bop. They can even encroach upon each other’s style, as in The Bad Plus’s kick ass jazz version of Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. Or listen to any Iron Maiden album featuring Nico McBrain on drums, especially ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’, to hear a jazz trained drummer at the top of his game.  Most of the best metal drummers list jazz legends like Chick Webb and Buddy Rich as major influences, in the same way that Tony Iommi credits gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt  as being instrumental to his playing style (see ‘Planet Caravan’ on ‘Paranoid’).

Of course, as similar as they may be in some respects, the two styles of music are vastly different in a great many more. Consequentially, I tend to listen to each under very different circumstances. Metal is my getting stuff done music. When I sit down at my desk to write of a morning (ok, afternoon), I usually need something rhythmic and plodding to shift me into writing mode, the bass drum propelling me forward, banishing any lethargy from my soul.

Jazz though is for reading. To settle down to the sofa with a volume of Alice Walker, Asimov or Melville, one needs a good jazz album. Most of the musicians I love are favourites because of their lyrical ability, but it’s difficult to listen to them when reading, because instead of concentrating on the words on the page, I’m lip synching to the words in the air. Jazz though wraps itself around the words, compliments them, soundtracks and illuminates them. Rock music kick-starts my day, jazz draws it to a close.

I came to jazz the way most people have come to jazz over the last fifty years, via Miles Davis and ‘Kind of Blue’. If you’re used to more regular or mainstream forms of music then listening to jazz is like learning to speak a new language. ‘Kind of Blue’ serves as Rosetta Stone to this arcane tongue. It’s also a fine indicator of how far your comprehension has progressed. There was a time when I hated jazz and even thirty seconds of any jazz album was enough to make me feel physically sick. First listening to ‘Kind of Blue’ was like hearing Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first time. Or struggling through that first, tortuous reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’. It was jarring, strange and didn’t always make a whole lot of sense.

These days I speak jazz fluently and ‘Kind of Blue’ sounds to me as mainstream as anything else I listen to. To be honest, I prefer ‘Sketches of Spain’, but that’s solely because of Miles’s heavenly interpretation of Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto de Aranjuez’, one of my favourite pieces of classical music. That said, ‘Kind of Blue’ is in many ways the perfect jazz album, the musical equivalent of ‘Frankenstein’ or Rimbaud’s ‘Ma Boheme Fantaisie’ in the original. It’s musica universalis, the music of the spheres in which ancient philosophers and eighteenth century astronomers and composers believed. Miles Davis is to jazz what J. S. Bach is to the classical tradition.

As mentioned earlier, Nina Simone blurs the lines between blues and jazz, as well as pop and rock, from covers of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles and half a dozen Dylan tracks, to her own compositions, like ‘Mississippi Goddam’, written in response to myriad racist murders committed in the 1960s (she called it a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written), to the instrumentals that showed off her sheer virtuosity on the piano. The latter, in particular, are showcased on her 1958 debut album, ‘Little Girl Blue’. To hear songs like ‘Central Park Blues’, ‘Good Bait’, the opening to ‘Mood Indigo’ is to experience serenity. These are complimented by the fragile tenderness of her voice in ‘He Needs Me’, ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and the title track, ‘Little Girl Blue’.

‘Little Girl Blue’ also contains perhaps Nine Simone’s most famous track, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, made famous when used in an advert in the 1980s, selling a product the name of which I care neither to name or even indeed recall.

Nina got screwed out of the royalties for her first few albums and was understandably belligerent in refusing to play any of their tracks live, making sure audiences comprehended her exact reasons. The albums still exist however and the world is a better place for their existence. She could be tough, demanding, insisting people refer to her as Dr Simone after she was awarded an honorary doctorate, but I guess she had to be. There isn’t an African-American musician in the last century who hasn’t experienced the kind of abuse that should fill any rational human being with revulsion. Slaves made America, north and south, what it is today and virtually every musical style to come out of the States in the last hundred years, good, bad and indifferent, is infused with the blues. A lot of the time I think the kinds of racism that is pointed towards the African American population is born out of jealousy and pure resentment.

I once knew a couple, she of Afro-Caribbean, he of eastern European Jewish decent. In Britain, few people looked at them twice, yet I was told that in the States, even in Manhattan, people on the street would regularly drop out of reality in seeing them together. My response upon hearing this was, what, has no one in New York ever heard of George Gershwin? The music of Gershwin embodies the artistic evolution that results in cultural cross fertilisation. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is often mislabelled a classical track, but it is as much jazz music as anything. For many, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is the theme song of New York, the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, one of the cultural crucibles of the world, an area of outstanding ethnic mixing. But then Gershwin’s all-black opera, ‘Porgy and Bess’, a work forged in the Manhattan melting pot by the son of east European Jewish immigrants was a flop at the time of its original production in the 30s, derided and sneered at by the usual subjects. It’s heartening to know that ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess’, with lyrics by DuBose Heyward, became, briefly, for a time, the most recorded song in history a couple of years ago, with everyone from Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong recording versions of the song. Nina Simone recorded her own version. Miles Davis too.

Jazz blurs not only into blues, but into classical music. Aside from Gershwin, some of the greatest American composers of the 20^th century came out of jazz. One has only to think of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the two greatest composers, pianists and band leaders to come out of the era of swing and big band. “One more time.” Many of the most recorded jazz standards in recording history are Duke Ellington compositions, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘ In A Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Mood Indigo’. “One more, once.” The high pitched horns of the Count Basie Orchestra almost define the sound of the 1940s. It somehow doesn’t sound right hearing them without the occasional doodlebug exploding outside.

Nina Simone I would characterise as my favourite female singer. Yet for all time jazz composer and performer, I can only pick one man and that is Charles Mingus. Much as I love ‘Little Girl Blue’ ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Sketches of Spain’, I adore ‘Mingus Ah Um’ above all others. If the ‘Count Basie Orchestra’ are the sound of the 40s, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ defines the 1950s, even if it wasn’t recorded until the decade’s final year (I can be forgiven, as I wasn’t born at the time). Released in the same year as ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s peerless ‘Time Out’, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ somehow encapsulates that time more than its contemporaries. ‘Kind of Blue’ is timeless and ‘Time Out’ mixed up with so many styles of world music as to almost escape the gravitational pull of jazz altogether.

‘Mingus Ah Um’, with its defining track, ‘Fables of Faubus’, written in mockery of Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas who deployed the National Guard in order to prevent two African-American students from attending high school in Little Rock, stands out as an album of its time. It’s an album of outstanding tracks, ‘Better Git it in Your Soul’, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, ‘Jelly Roll’ and ‘Self-Portrait in Three Colours’.

Like Ellington, Basie and Gershwin, Mingus is a genius composer. His meisterwerk, ‘Epitaph’, is so complicated that it was only successfully performed for the first time more than a decade after his death. Any fan of Radiohead will know Mingus’s work, if only by proxy, with both ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘We suck Young Blood’ both heavily influenced by the Mingus track, ‘Freedom’ (from the album, ‘Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus’, a title that inspired at least one ‘Jazz Club’ sketch on 90s programme, ‘The Fast Show’).

Indeed, it’s indicative of how far my comprehension of jazz music has come that there are so many jazz artists that I listen to these days that I have not yet even mentioned, including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Cassandra Wilson and The Bad Plus.

I still listen to heavy metal, but much of it being the music of my youth and, strangely for a genre firmly rooted in the mid-twentieth century, the list of jazz artists I listen to is marginally more contemporary than that of the metal. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what’s contemporary is what’s new to you in that instant. I read 102 books last year and only one of them was published within the year (Philip Hoare’s, ‘The Sea Inside’), so who needs contemporary? The past is another country. They may do things differently there, but it also means there’s a lot to discover for yourself, as if it had never been discovered before.

Get it done.

And Another Thing... Never Say Never Again

"No wonder the country's fallen apart, no one says 'forsooth' anymore."

                                                                                                Mark Steel

I love the English language. It is probably the most versatile language in the world. And not because it is the language that I speak, but because it is the convergence of a nexus of older languages (Saxon, French, Greek and Latin), liberally sprinkled with myriad words from other languages (Sanskrit, Arabic, Urdu, German, Yiddish, Spanish etc) to swell its vocabulary to well over a million words. It is elastic and it is constantly evolving. The English of Shakespeare is different to that of Chaucer; the English of Mary Shelley different to that of Alice Walker. It had myriad dialects and variations, with a kaleidoscope of shades of meaning. The idiom of Jane Austin is drastically removed from the slang spoken in African-American ghettos, yet they remain essentially the same language.

English is also a rare example of a working class victory, with the dialect of the serfs having usurped the French spoken in the forts of knights and kings, absorbing and overpowering it in the crucible of the Medieval marketplace. And even after China becomes the dominant economic force in the world, English will probably survive in one form or another (being the language of international business), as a mishmash of English and Chinese. It started life as Anglish and will probably end up as Panglish.

That said, I believe that there are certain words that should be given special protection and only used in certain circumstances. The words ‘genius’ and ‘tragedy’ are two examples. The constant need of journalists in the English speaking world to sensationalise every trivial event has come to mean that these words are far too often abused. Lionel Messi, for example, is certainly a very talented footballer, but he is not a genius. Michelangelo was a genius and no matter how much spin Messi may be able to generate on a football using boots specially designed for that one purpose, at the end of the day all he’s done is score a goal. If you’re impressed by that, go to the Accademia in Florence and take a look at Michelangelo’s David: It’ll blow your fucking mind.

And this isn’t snobbery either. I’d say Newton was a genius, but not Einstein; James Joyce, but not Shakespeare. I can’t exactly define why I think this, but I think that it has something to do with Newton and Joyce having a fine grasp of complex ideas, while Einstein and Shakespeare seem to have guessed and hoped for the best. I suppose that I associate genius with the action of having a grasp of what it is that you are doing, rather than taking a leap of faith. William Blake attacked men like Newton for trusting to reason rather than belief, yet to me reason is what makes Newton a true genius. However, this theory is open to debate (like any good theory) and I’m not entirely convinced by the weight of my own argument. Einstein and Shakespeare are still godlike to me. And I’d always considered Bob Dylan to be a genius, but given that he has always claimed that he has no idea where his lyrics come from, I have just rendered him ineligible for consideration.

The word tragedy is believed to come from ‘tragus’, the Ancient Greek word for goat. Tragic plays developed from songs composed during festivals to the god Dionysus, when goats were sacrificed as an offering to the god of wine, theatre and fertility (amongst his other patronages). From these songs came the great tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, where the tragic hero’s fate is already sealed by the gods long before he was born. The classic tragic hero of course is Oedipus.

Two and a half thousand years later and now every time some teenager dies of a drug overdose or a soldier is killed by an IED in Afghanistan, it is referred to a tragedy. As sad as these events are, they are not tragedies, but statistical probabilities. We should perhaps not refer to them in such cold and unemotional language as ‘statistical probabilities’, but to resort to the opposite extreme is just as ludicrous. Unless it was prophesised by a soothsayer that such deaths would occur and the victim’s parents had done everything in their power to send the victim away at birth and prevent the event from coming to pass, then they are not tragedies. If you want to read a true modern tragedy, read Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History', where the victim's fate is declared during the novel's first sentence.

It barely needs to be said that when our forces kill civilians during drone attacks, these deaths are put down to ‘human error’, or, as George Bush I said of the ‘accidental’ bombing of an Iraqi fallout shelter filled with woman and children during the First Gulf War, a ‘PR disaster’. We don’t mean to kill civilians and so no one should make a fuss when we do, as if carelessness is any less a crime than directed terrorism. By application of the word ‘tragedy’ to the deaths of our own troops, we can gloss over the very real truth that their lives are worth as little to the architects of the War on Terror as the hundreds of thousands of ‘non-combatants’ that have been killed by ‘our’ side.

(As an aside, we should always be suspicious of words like ‘non-combatant’. They are the Orwellian equivalent of phrases like, ‘Don’t think of an apple’. The first thing one does is think of an apple because the clause, ‘Don’t think of an apple’, contains the sub-clause, ‘Think of an apple’. Similarly, ‘non-combatant’ contains the sub-clause, ‘combatant’, immediately planting doubt in the reader’s mind as to just how non-combatant these so-called ‘non-combatants’ are. Politicians are practised distorters of the English language and should be guarded against at all times. Our first defence against their dissemination should be simply to turn them off and judge them purely in terms of what they do, not what they say. Our second line of defence is to always to ask the question, ‘What are you really up to?’.)

However, the word that is misused by more people than any other, the one that really gets my tragus, is ‘never’. I hear it being abused in one form or another on a weekly, if not daily, basis, in some form as thus: “I’ve never had chips since last week.” It makes me want to scream: “Well then you have had chips! LAST WEEK FOR A START!!!” ‘Never’ is an adverb meaning at no point in the past and at no point in the future and is in fact a contraction of the adverbial phrase, ‘not ever’. If you say, “I’ve never been to Rome before” while you’re stood ouside the Coliseum, that’s just plain wrong. However, if you say, “He always wanted to see Rome, but he never got the chance” over the grave of your recently deceased father, well that is correct (but not indicative of a tragedy).

I’m as guilty of misusing ‘never’ as many other people, but I’m trying to consciously replace it with ‘haven’t’ or ‘hadn’t’ or some other appropriate word or phrase. There is a certain laziness creeping into our language, with verbs like ‘do’ and ‘got’ replacing more descriptive phrases, even among the academic community. Sentences like, ‘We’ve made a series of calculations’ are being pushed out by more simplistic phrases like, ‘We did the sums’, as if we’re all still in primary school. The shades of meaning in our language are being lost in favour of extremes. What will we do when a true genius comes along or a true tragedy takes place? How will we be able to convey the state of something not ever having taken place when we have disabused our once noble language of all meaning? And does anyone else care?

Like the Newspeak of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’, the loss of descriptive language robs us of the ability to express complex ideas and emotions, which is all the more essential as we become isolated from each other through the loss of common experience. Technology was meant to bring the like minded together and yet it seems more and more to me that its real purpose is to divide and to subdue. All the more reason to protect from cultural erosion the keystones to effective communication.